February 2014 Update for the Lync Desktop Client

It has been a year since Lync 2013 was released for general availability and the Lync team is truly thrilled at the progress of the product and all the enhancements we have brought to market. In the past year, we’ve delivered four major updates to the Lync desktop client, bringing you new features such as Q&A manager, embedded IM images, Lync Meeting recording options, and spellcheck. Of course, we are not stopping there. For the February Update for Lync 2013 Desktop Client, the Lync team is excited to introduce three more new features.

Features included in the February Update:

Toggle pictures of sender/receiver

Support of high-resolution monitors (200% scaling mode)

Transfer files and pictures in a Persistent Chat room

Toggle pictures of sender/receiver

In the last Lync client update, we released a feature that displayed the picture of the sender/receiver in an IM conversation or group conversation. This made it easy to visually identify who had just sent an IM, especially in the context of a group conversation. However, we received a lot of feedback through the blog and other listening channels that users wanted an option to turn this off. So in the February update, we added in the functionality to choose whether or not pictures of sender/receiver would appear in IM conversations.

Releasing this feature is an example of how we take feedback seriously so please, keep the feedback coming by letting us know on this blog, through Microsoft field personnel, and the Technology Adoption Programs (TAP). We want to make sure Lync is the best product it can be.

While pictures on these displays are amazing, they also present some visual challenges. When users increase resolution, it inherently decreases the size of each pixel (assuming same display size). By decreasing the size of each pixel, the content shown on the display appears smaller. Ultimately, when display Dots-Per-Inch (DPI) gets sufficiently dense, this “shrinking effect” can make content hard to see and UI targets difficult to click/tap.

In order to address these scale/DPI issues, in Window 8.1 the maximum DPI scaling value was increased from 150% to 200%. This additional scaling capability provides two distinct advantages for high-DPI displays on Windows 8.1:

200% scaling enables pixel-doubling for up-scaling which provides a clear and crisp appearance for images, graphics, and text.

For comparison, here’s what you would see in Windows 8 in the Display control panel under Appearance and Personalization:

In Windows 8.1 you can see here that DPI scaling goes up to 200%:

Previously, icons in Lync could have looked fuzzy and pixelated in these high resolutions, but with the February update, the team has addressed this issue with support for 200% DPI scaling.

Transfer files and pictures in a Persistent Chat room

In the November update to the Lync client, we added the ability to escalate a persistent chat room to a Lync Meeting. This month, we continue to add functionality to persistent chat rooms by enabling file and picture transfers. Users simply drag and drop files/pictures into the persistent chat room and it is transferred to other members of the room.

The feature is supported for Lync Server deployments only as persistent chat is not available for Lync Online deployments. Also, the feature works only for users connected inside of a company’s network.

For admins:

All the features in the February update for the Lync client are client side only. Therefore, no changes are necessary from the server side to enable your users to access these new features.

+1 to Frankie. Selecting text, copy and paste are awful. I always use notepad and copy text from one Lync’s tab -> Notepad -> edit -> another tab.

Also my nightmares about Lync desktop client:Ctrl+Enter in IM starting call (not send message). Why, god, why? Other Microsoft’s products (Skype, Outlook) use it for sending messages, I used this shortcut since ICQ2000 in all messengers and in Lync i making calls everytime. I’m not alone, many of my colleagues complain to me about this “feature”. Even CEO of my company asked me, how to change it.

I have to say, MS is over-thinking the photos thing. It really needs to be a more granular customization. I LIKE having the thumbnail photos in the contact list. I LIKE having them at the TOP of each chat window. I don’t even mind seeing my own photo at the top of the link contact list in the status area. But seeing them REPEATEDLY (including my own photo) within the context of EACH chat is a huge waste of screen resources. The current option is basically “all or nothing”. By comparison, the “Tabbed Chat” add-on for Lync 2010 nailed it… you saw the photo of whom you were chatting with at the top of each chat window, and that was it. The rest was just… business.

Have you Lync team noticed that some of the chats are missed because users do not notify the new messages? So may I ask you to add configuration (which of course should be controlled by the user) where user can define if s/he likes to get the new chat window on the screen. So that they are not hidden into task bar.

And it would be also super cool if you fix also the chat window and you can type the following text without emoticons: “Did you get any gift(s) from the customer?”

@Dervis KemalYes I know the product, but in my mind this is like a fundamental behavior of the client. The basic stuff must work on client without 3rd party tools. Client must not work the way that people can miss chats easily.

@AaronYes, I know…But that feature will not affect to your customer site, neither your colleagues. And people love to use the emoticons, so why we have to block it?

This is not so bad problem in English, but other languages are having big problems with it.

And the solution on the code side: “if there is no space (‘ ‘) before emoticon, do not place emoticon”.

We can also discuss why the client is not following WYSIWYG editing. So emoticons are converted when you sent the message, not during writing. So users do not have any change to correct their message if they see that emoticons gives a wrong message.

But I do not give up. I think it was over 10 years ago I asked can we get images into chats, and now we have it ! 😀

I’m not happy right now. I just uninstalled the 2013 service pack in order to get Lync back to the way it used to be. This update added more visual annoyances than features I actually make use of. Changes were made that did not need to be made.

I really don’t think the message text should end up on the right side of the person’s name. With multiple people in the conversation with different name lengths, it looks funny. Some names were far too close to the message text and it looked like their name was part of the sentence. At the very least, it feels like it is wasting space. I haven’t seen any other IM client do something like this. (That’s the bad kind of innovation!)

I also have the message focus issue. If I double-click a contact to send them a message but have another IM window open, the keyboard focus goes to the wrong tab/window… the hidden one. There is no excuse for this.

Please stop reducing my headset volume to half. If I want to change the volume, leave it at the volume I specify.

Give us the ability to easily clear/reset rich text formatting. My copy-paste from the web is always so nasty.

All in all, I was quite happy with Lync 2010. I didn’t mind the modern interface of Lync 2013, but it seemed to be a bit more clumsy and definitely more laggy. Since the release of 2013, both clients have gotten progressively worse. (2010 doesn’t like to play well with rich text when the other user is using 2013.)

Working with SharePoint document librariesDocument libraries are collections of files that you can share with team members on a Web based on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services. For example, you can create a library of common documents for a project, and team members can use their Web browsers to find the files, read them, and make comments. Users with Microsoft Office 2003 can check out and edit the files as if they resided on a local or network drive.

What about Lync 2011 for the Mac?? How about upgrades to a client that desperately needs it? I’m managing an Office365 deployment with Lync for an educational institution which consists of 75% Mac users. What is the road map for the Mac OS X client??

First up, kudos to the Lync client teem for this continual stream of improvements to the product. It’s great to see the ongoing commitment and development effort. As a customer, I really appreciate getting new toys for free with each release.

However, can I suggest that instead of adding minor new functionality, we spend some time tackling the big problems of the Lync client? My suggestions centre around the points that really frustrate me in every day operation.

1 – As Petri has mentioned, compared to the old OCS client it’s incredibly easy to miss that you have new messages. Can we come up with a better way to notify users of unread messages? Can the taskbar icon stay orange, as the old OCS client used to?

2 – Focus and modality of the Lync tabs. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a couple of lync conversations open in the background when a new IM arrives from a different person. I click on the toast notification and start typing, automatically pressing enter to send. It’s about then that I realise that whilst the Lync client has opened up the new conversation tab, the text input focus is still on the previous conversation and I’ve just sent a message to someone other than the intended person. Given the inherently personal nature of IMs, you can see how this can be potentially quite damaging. Yes, I should check before I press send, but neither should the software work against me.

3 – Resize behaviour of the Lync client conversation window. I’m lucky enough to use 2 x 24″ monitors. The default size of the Lync client window is too small for me. So I resize it. Then one of the conversations I’m in gets popped out to an AV conference, and the IM window automatically resizes itself back to small. Or I close a tab, and it resizes. Or I close all the tabs, and when I initiate another conversation it opens at the same default too-small-for-me size. Some days it feels that all I’m doing is resizing the Lync client window.

4 – And just to prove that some people are NEVER happy, can we talk about the inline sender/receiver images? I appreciate that we can now turn them off. For a 1-on-1 IM, this is perfect. I know who I’m talking with, their image is shown right there on the tab, I don’t need to see their smiling face on every line. HOWEVER, for a multi-party conference though, having the inline images can be very, very useful as a visual trigger of who’s saying what. Ideally, I’d like a way to disable the images for a 1:2:! IM, but keep them in a multi-party conference.

Please take this in the spirit that it’s offered – usability suggestions to make an already good product great. I spend a lot of my day in Lync, and we’re about to undertake an EV deployment to centre *all* our communications on Lync. So I’m heavily invested in the system, and want to see it as the best it can be. I’m very excited about what the platform is going to bring us in the near future. Again, kudos to the Lync team for a constant stream of new functionality being delivered.

I’m not too excited about this update:1) You claim to listen to our feedback but we asked for an option to remove the sender/receiver images from the IM conversation. Instead, you gave us an option that disables images in the conversations AND in the contact list at the same time – why would you do this??? The contact list already has a separate option in the settings to achieve this. We want to disable the images ONLY in the conversations.2) You claim to improve DPI scaling with this update but have you checked what the conversations look like with high DPI settings now? The estate for the actual message is about 3×3 centimetres on my screen.3) I couldn’t agree more with Matt. Why is still not possible to resize the conversation window (and for Lync to remember the size for all subsequent conversations)??? The conversation window is tiny.

Hi, I agree with Matt, these are very minor new functionality. Do you want to read about new ideas on Lync? Go to http://lync.ideascale.com/ there are 316 ideas (at this moment) that wait to be implemented.Many of these ideas are about Enterprise Voice, work on these point. Every of our customer are interested in Lync as a PBX replacement, no one care about Persistent ChatRegardsLuca

Having a *really* annoying bug/feature since the SP1 update. In a chat window, participant name and chat text are in 2 columns, which wastes a HUUUUGE amount of space. Why ? I have to resize the windows to the minimum so that it goes how it should be, i.e. participant name and chat text underneath. Please fix this ASAP !!

Thanks for giving the option to remove photos in chats, but the labelling of the option in settings in not very clear. Can you work on making the configuration screen easier ?

GregT_UK: This new bug is caused by high-DPI in Windows (try switching to 100% DPI and you’ll see that messages are aligned correctly in Lync IM window). It’s truly ironic, since Lync team claims they improved *Support of high-resolution monitors* with this update… [tag:Fail]

fully agree with Matt. I would like to see more effort spent on major issues like speed, ressource usage and usability on desktop (using mouse). For me the most annoig point is this hover thing – it takes at least one second to get options displayed and selected a simple drop-down menue is much easier to use. This is great software but 2013 release is far from enterprise grade as 2010 was.

the Lync team needs an option to automatically open all new conversations into a window that isnt minimized. The user needs to be able to decide if he wants a window or the conversation minimized — not the Microsoft developer.

Seriously the photo thing is a poorly implemented change. The whole reason to ditch photos is to reduce the MASSIVE Amount of screen real estate the LYNC chat and persistent chat consume (its ridiculous). So why not just have a checkbox that says “turn off thumbnails or photos” in chat. The way you implemented it does that but it also makes every photo in a conference turn into a silly blue icon. If you are going to consume real estate in conferences with an icon it might as well be the photo! And then, in private IM the photos are still there ANYWAY regardless of the box being checked, huh? did you even understand what people wanted?

I think you missed the mark here big time and didn’t understand why people were complaining about not being able to shut off photos. Its not about hiding peoples ugly mugs, its about REDUCING screen Real estate.

However Kudos on file sharing in persistent chat that was one of my 30 complaints about IM in LYNC in general. This was a good add.

We have updated the Lync 2013 client with latest feb updates along with office sp1 update for office. But still not able to transfer file in my persistent chat group. Drag and drop of file/image is not working when i try with copy and paste it gives me “inline image and file inputs are disabled” error.Please Help..

Can we expect an update to the Lync 2013 Basic Client this spring? We’re pushing our client to move into the full client, but as they prepare for that effort, they’d like to understand if a Basic Client refresh is pending.

Just in the beginning process of moving from Domino SameTime to Lync… i have used lync 2010 in the past as well…i have 2 things for feedback so far…– Why no inline pictures in multi party chats i know i can share my desktop or send a file but still… if i can do it for 1 to 1 why not 1 to X?– What on gods green earth did you do to the emoticons… the old ones looked great. Is there a way to change those back without downgrading… or maybe being able to add our own like i can in SameTime?

Great improvements. Have you thought about providing aids to maintaining discussion threads within chat rooms. Like hashtag inheritance. Or other threading methods. It would make the topic feed more powerful because it would allow message creators a way to easily relate a message to an exiting thread.

Our firm uses persistent chat very heavily – it’s one of the main reasons we implemented Lync. Back with the November 2013 update the timestamp behavior changed from being displayed with every message to only being displayed with the first message a user posts. That’s critical for us. Any chance of bringing that back? Unit that happens we can’t deploy the latest version.

Well one thing is clear, NOBODY on the Lync team cares what we all think because they don’t read these. If they did, they could easily get a sense of the magnitude of the problem with the conversation resize problem, a STANDARD feature in every friggin application running on Windows.. Oh Except Lync 2013. Well done!!

Also the picture update removes pictures from everywhere which is NOT what we asked for. We asked for pictures to be removed from the conversation itself. I still want to see the person’s picture in my contact list.

There is one thing that really bugs me when using Lync 2013. In a conversation, it is easy to tell senders apart. However, when the same sender sends a few items in a row, there is no distinction between the messages. I find that I have to read the whole blob again or else I may miss something. It would be nice if the background for messages was different by user and had borders separating consecutive messages.

Is there any way that this could get into the next update as an available setting?

i have a hp spectre 13 with qhd display (2560 x 1440) if someone else is sharing the desktop it looks to small and is hard to read. i have 200% scalling in windows 8.1 but it seems it has no effect on lync, is there a solution?

BRING THE OLD LYNC EMOJIS BACK!!!!!!! seriosuly the new ones are not good and they a too bold to even tell what they are…. so bring the old motion emojis back. Also add fun new ones most like the iphone ones.

Lync 2013 has been a fairly frustrating experience compared to 2010 so far. Here are some issues we (me and many of my colleagues) are seeing with Lync 2013:

1. This update broke CTRL+TAB. 🙁

2. We only wanted to remove contact pictures within conversations – not *everywhere*. For example, I still want my contact picture at the top of the main Lync window.

3. Sometimes when I try to message someone, it messages the wrong person. For example, it usually messages the first tab my list of conversations instead of the person I just double-clicked from the main Lync window to chat with. This also sometimes happens when I click on a Message Notification popup and start typing. It actually sends to the first person in my tabbed conversations list instead of message notificationI just opened.

4. The Copy/Paste experience from a conversation window is absolutely TERRIBLE. Just take you mouse and try to select a line or two lines of text in a conversation. It just doesn’t work. The cursor jumps around like crazy and *never* selects exactly what I want. Also, why does it copy the timestamp and username!?! I’m trying to copy important information from a contact so I can paste it somewhere and continue my workflow. I don’t want it to copy the timestamp or the user name. I understand some people may want that, but it should be much much easier to select text in a window without accidentally selecting a bunch of other things I didn’t want to. This was never a problem in 2010.

5. Copy/Paste occasionally keeps some stuff in buffer or something. For example, sometimes when I copy some text from Lync, and paste it somewhere – it actually pastes a bunch of old stuff + the new stuff I copied. Its like the copy paste buffer was never flushed when I copied the new item. A lot of my colleagues and I are seeing this issue and it’s really annoying because there’s no easy way to flush this buffer. I have to go to notepad and copy something else to try and clear the buffer before I can copy something out of Lync again.

Lync 2013 drives me NUTS! Its a painful experience to use it. It fails miserably at very (very) basic functionality tasks like copy/paste. When someone sends me a link and I need to copy it, why on earth would I ever (I mean, EVERRRRR) want to also copy the sender’s name and the timestamp(!!!!!!!). It only shows lack of even sanity testing on the product.

LOL reading all these painful feedbacks I feel like I am reading the Exchange blog on a topic of yet another called back Exchange 2013 update. There must be huge madness inside this company if they screw up all their products with these updates from month to month. That was not the case a couple of years ago…

soder: I don’t think there’s any madness. I doubt they even bother reading the comments here. The majority of features/fixes has been requested for a long time and nothing has been done. E.g. window resizing, wrong focus after doubleclicking a contact, broken copy/paste, missing time stamps in persistent chat, easy to miss new messages that stop flashing, text accidentally coverted to emoticon – none of this is new. They just don’t care.

Please change them back to the version from Lync 2010 or pre-update versions,Also I don`t like the fact that you can’t disable just the contact picture inside the IM window. Please can this be fixed as soon as possible?

So you removed the the sender/receiver pictures, but there’s still a big silhouette box in its place! That’s not what people want, they want the waste of space taken care of. Having all those boxes is just as bad as having the pictures. Worse, because at least with pictures there’s a point to the waste of space (if the person has included a picture).

Thank you for putting in these horrid icons – you have messed up something that was simply wonderful. I would like to imagine there was a design contest within Microsoft to see which person could dream up the worst emoticons. To validate that the winner of the contest had indeed created world-beating emoticons, it was decided to deploy them worldwide. Now that the winner has been validated, I would like to add +100000000000000000000 votes to encourage Microsoft to wipe these emoticons off the face of the earth and get back what was there previously.In summary, what were you people thinking??????? Did you all get hit on the head at the same time?

We currently offer solutions to the Microsoft gaps around Persistent chat for Mac users and extending Persistent chat to Mobile platforms for enterprise. We have a highly evolved web interface for all Lync persistent chat variations across multiple platforms, http://www.mindlinksoft.com pop along to see how we are supporting the scene.

The new emoticons are awful and pathetic. If I was a manager and my design team handed these in, I would sack the lot of them and hire a team of five year olds, who would no doubt turn in something better.

Lync2013 SUCKS BIGTIME. Please stop torturing us with this atrocity. Infact the whole of Office 2013 is a massive load of garbage, the UI is so pathetic. Its brought down my productivity by hiding things, moving things…for no apparent reason.

Hello Lync Team… Do you even care what we have to say? ….just see what JBUKFan has to say….

JBUKFan 19 Mar 2014 10:17 PM #
Well one thing is clear, NOBODY on the Lync team cares what we all think because they don’t read these. If they did, they could easily get a sense of the magnitude of the problem with the conversation resize problem, a STANDARD feature in every friggin application
running on Windows.. Oh Except Lync 2013. Well done!!

1) It’s HUGE. It wastes too much screen space. You all assume that everyone has massively high resolution displays, which isn’t the case in the real world. 2) If you use lync for conference calls that require a pass-code to join, and you copy the pass-code
into the copy/paste buffer, Lync flushes the buffer when you get to the screen that displays the dial pad. That means you have to go back and re-copy it. That’s logic baffles me. Stop flushing the buffer. 3) dialing out interface always shows this huge window
and won’t remember to display in "compact" mode, so EVERY time I have to switch it to that mode. Again, this logic baffles me why this can’t be a setting. 4) Overall, more "clicking" or "hoovering" over something to access a control is required in this version
than the previous. The folks in charge of the UI must really live in vacuum where they have all day to just play with the buttons. For the love of all things efficient, fix this interface!

In Office Communicator R2 2007, I was able to resize the window listing all my contacts to whatever size (and width) I wanted it to be. However, in Lync 2013 it refuses to adjust the width to as narrow as I want it for display (I like to keep the window
visible on the left of my 1080p display. Why does the display for Lync seem so much less flexible than for Communicator,which it replaced?

In previous versions i was able to shrink the display, so that I saw only the names. With 2013 the display is 5 inches across on my screen and I can’t make it any narrower. Why did that change? Also, what happened to the option to use "friendly" names?

The checkbox to hide the photos in the conversation window worked great until version 15.0.4659.1001. Now they are back so I not only have a photo at the top of the window, I also have a photo for every comment posted in the conversation. What a huge waste
of visual real estate! Even in a multi-participant chat, I can read the names to see who is typing and don’t need the pictures, too. The checkbox is still unchecked; what is the new way to disable the display of the contact photos in the conversation window?

I endorse everything that Matt has reported and think that Microsoft should take our comments seriously and start fixing these issues/improving the Lync client. We just recently deployed Lync 2013 Foundation throughout our organization +20000 computers
and we have been getting a lot of complaints from the users specially on these two topics:

– IM conversation window resize bug
It is incredibly annoyng that every new IM conversation window you open resizes to a small window, it just does not store/save the window size that you define, this standard window size makes the conversation field too small. That’s kind of basic in any Windows
software and even the cheapest crappy software does that, except for Lync 2013. On Lync 2010 and OCS it worked just fine, it would "remember" the last size of your conversation windows.

– IM conversation sender/receiver pictures
Well, you added an option to remove the inline sender/receiver pictures but it also removes the pictures from the Contact List and your own picture from Lync’s main window, that’s quite weird, it does solve the IM conversation window issue of losing lots of
screen space for annoyng repetitive pictures of the sender/receiver when the sender picture is already there at the top of the conversation window!! however removing the pictures from the contact list as well makes Lync 2013 looks like OCS 2007, so when searching
from contacts you cannot identify them from the pictures. So you pretty much solved a problem by creating a new one, by using this option we have to decide between screwing up the IM conversation window with useless pictures or the contact list with no pictures.

– Copy & paste from IM conversation window
This is absolutely buggy, try to copy and paste something from an IM coversation window by selecting the conversation text from the bottom to the top, you will see that hovering the mouse over to the top of the window while selecting the text will not make
the text to be scrolled up, so you are only able to select the text that is displayed on the window.

Just found out through the new Lync blog at the office blog that with the Lync client update from October version 15.0.4659.1001 the option to disable sender/receiver inline pictures in IM conversations has finally been implemented as it should. We are
now able to disable the pictures from the IM conversation window without removing them from the contact list.

The copy&paste issues have also been fixed.

If you are already running Lync 2013 client version 15.0.4659.1001 do the following:
Open Lync Options, select IM from the left-hand side panel, then under the IM settings checkmark the one called "Hide pictures in IM". This will do the trick.

For a new update to Lync, I must say it seems offer many improvements that simply do not work.

Group Chats or meetings do not show names or photos, instead by default shows a horizontal silhouette view of the participants, no name or picture. Manually changing the Participants view shows meaningful information of the name but it is required for each
and every time.

Emoticon designs? – why did the rich colorful icons get replaced with basic shapes that appear to be low resolution graphics from a retro era of the past where the colors palate was limited to a max of 8 colors. Most emoticons have only 2 or 3 colors and low
resolution which are so small in terms of detail, it is hard to know what they signify (e..g, distinguishing between wink smiley and sarcastic smiley). Was there a reason for this bland, user –unfriendly update for something that worked well in previous versions?

Options/ My Picture has the Edit or remove Picture greyed out. Show my picture does not work for others even though I see the one assigned in Lync 2010 but now I cannot change it. Limitations on both parts.

I just figure out how to get hide the picture on the top of the window and semi-revert back to the prior look. Just click the People button down at the bottom and the picture will be replaced with the names list and their statues. While it is still annoying
how much room this takes up, it is better than looking at the goofy gifs. YMMV

This is very frustrating. Rant warning… I am so disappointed in MS products with the latest 2014 and Win 8 releases that seem to ignore the needs of desktop enterprise users who VALUE desktop space and cannot have mickey mouse fonts, wasted white space,
huge icons, massive white borders, redundant info, etc. It took me hours to get Office semi usable and visually appealing again via custom adjustments to reduce wasted desktop space. I still can’t get of the massive white border around the Lync desktop window
that makes the charts about 40% smaller than they need to be. Did you stop using focus groups and user feedback to guide new releases? I have been a MS user since Win 1.0 and am now about to call it a day with MS. I had to downgrade from Win 8 to 7 to be able
to get anything done. MS has just gone crazy and must be programmed by kids who use nothing more than a touch for everything they do.

I have a unique problem whereby the Lync 2013 Window doesn’t pop up after I pick up a call with the handset. The initial pop up does show – but not the window after I pick up the call. My colleagues don’t seem to have this problem.

This is only important when i want to transfer a call to my headset – I can do so in an ‘open’ conversation.

As Frankie said, the COPY PASTE is frustrating as hell. I am severely disappointed in the QA of this. How could they not try this basic thing out that ALL companies do???? Especially in the Tech/Software industry??
We constantly have people IMing us directory names, file names, pieces of code, baseline names etc and I can NEVER copy the text that I want. The cursor jumps around, and ALWAYS copies the darn user name and time stamp….WHY IN THE WORLD WOULD ANYONE WANT
THAT?????????????????????

Lync is high DPI aware (great!), but not yet per-monitor DPI aware (would be awesome), meaning it’s not designed to cope with multiple monitors in use at once at different DPI levels. However, Lync tells Windows that it is per-monitor DPI aware. The result
of this bug is that if you have multiple monitors with different DPI capabilities, Lync will look fine on some monitors but too big or small on others.

The source of the bug is this file: "C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft OfficeOffice15LYNC.EXE.MANIFEST". It contains this line:
True/PM

The line should instead be:
True

Fortunately, LYNC.EXE.MANIFEST is a simple text file end users can fix it themselves. However, it would better if Microsoft fixed Lync so it worked out of the box – or, if they wanted to be truly awesome, actually added for per-monitor DPI support to Lync.

Is there any way for the "Gallery" to be text instead of pictures. Neither our comany nor our parters company that we link with have pictures. In may cases the pictures wouldn’t be of particular use anyway. What would be useful is essentially what was
in Lync 2010 which is to have a LIST of the participants. That previous display was much more useful than an empty set of avatar icons where the participant is only shown by a hover. That just isn’t a scalable method.

This new version of Lync has become an absolute memory hog and is terribly slow. I’m missing you unfettered Lync of the past that was a simple chat window that did only the simple things quickly and efficiently. And the new emoticons are exceptionally
terrible.

Request for lync team, my company just forced us to switch to lync. Can you close this project and discontinue this product. This way you will not generate more unwilling victims of your incompetence…. and we can all continue to use sametime happily!
This product is horrible, and the smilies are just a reflection of the type of quality control you show throughout

First impressions are this is poorly designed software. Too visually heavy and unclear choices for first time users. Terms that change like clicking on "set location" brings up "add/change location". When I type over my last added location did I just write
over the last one or does it still exist? When the box pops up and says exchange not connected what does that even mean to a non tech person? Did my phone stop working or not. Junk interface and the designer should not be working on products for people. A
nerd product for nerds not real people.

Skype for business is a excellent tool for daily routine work among team members and colleges, the only problem is while using communicator we can directly drag and drop files from mail attachments… now we need to save the same and share it. mostly dumps
and large data no need to save and keep copies.